28 Apr 2014

Chris Diskin, Economic Justice Programme Assistant at the Quaker Council for European Affairs in Brussels, is discussing his work on economic inequality and how international trade impacts on citizens’ well-being, and also on the role of Quakers at the EU during election time.

UK charities were urged not to take part in the government’s new ‘workfare’ programme launched on Monday 28 April. Community Work Placements require that jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) claimants do six months work placement or risk losing their benefits. Unite calls the scheme “nothing more than forced unpaid labour”.

Active Hope Book Groups Facebook Group - for people involved in, or who've taken part in, a shared journey of reading
Active Hope as a group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/292679187548650/ This is a private group - apply to join by clicking link in top right corner of
the page.

15 Apr 2014

A Friend who is on the Quaker Christian committee for
interfaith relations (I think that's right) asked me for contact details for
the interfaith forum or network in Colchester, as I took part in some of their
events about five or more years ago. For the record, before I forget further, it
was Richard Seebohm who was the most active within Quakers with the local interfaith
network at the time. He has since moved (to Oxford, I believe).

There is an Inter Faith Network for the UK – also on
Facebook:
but when I looked up North East Essex Faiths Forum (previously Colchester and Tendring IF Group) in their directory the
link crashed.

Probably the best bet now is to contact the Multi-Faith Chaplaincy
Centre at Essex Uni. Father Alexander Haig of St Helen's Chapel (the Greek
Orthodox Church in Colchester) was and still
is involved. The other person who may be able to help is Susan Rhodes, who was
for a time the Quaker contact on the Multi-Faith Chaplaincy.

7 Apr 2014

“The number of JSA Sanctions are at a 12
month high, and probably the highest ever on record. Yet, we don’t even know if
these Sanctions are working. There have been many examples of people being
sanctioned and not knowing why. If the aim of a sanction is to change peoples’
behaviour then people need to know why their benefits have been stopped
otherwise it is just a punitive punishment which is trying and save money.”

About Me

On Facebook and @robbiespenceuk and roadlesstraveller - blog started 2010 as somewhere to put facts, comments and thoughts (mostly other people’s) about history, politics, philosophy, economics and religion, before I forget them and before I bore my family with them. A commonplace book: a scrapbook of jottings as used for centuries as a memory aid. Themes include language and truth, especially dissident truth, which includes a lot of Noam Chomsky. The name ‘roadlesstraveller’ comes from the book by M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, which had a huge influence on the resurgence of New Age spirituality in the 1980s.